HANOI. June 20 (Interfax) - The Russian-North Korean agreement on military-technical and defense cooperation was signed because the previous one ceased to exist, it is nothing new, Russian President Vladimir Putin said.
"I want to point out that this agreement is not something new. We are concluding this agreement in relation to the old one having ceased to exist. And in our previous agreement, of 1962, everything was the same, there is nothing new here," Putin told journalists in Hanoi.
"Of course, in modern conditions it looks especially acute, but we barely changed anything," Putin said.
North Korea has similar agreements with other countries too, he said.
The agreement can be invoked "in case of a military aggression," Putin said in response to a question posed by Interfax.
Asked how this related to the conflict in Ukraine and whether North Korean volunteers could be invited to take part in the special military operation, he said: "It was not against Russia that the Ukrainian regime started the aggression. It started the aggression against the Lugansk and Donetsk people's republics that we recognized before they became part of Russia," Putin said.
"With regard to a possibility of somehow using each other's capabilities in this conflict. But we are not asking anyone about this. No one has offered this to us, so there is no need," Putin said.